Pennsylvania's early Quakers did their best to outlaw popular theater, song, and other sinful leisure amusements and diversions. By the later 1700s, however, Philadelphia was the theater capital of the nation. In the generations that followed, Pennsylvanians would play significant roles in the development of American show "business" and the commodification of entertainment.

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Lewis Hallam's Company arrives from London and establishes the first permanent theater in Pennsylvania, built on the side of South Street that was just outside the city limits of Philadelphia.

1760

Hallam's Company opens the Southwark Theater at Fourth and South Streets-also outside the city limits of Philadelphia.

1761

The Privy Council in England strikes down the Pennsylvania legislature's attempt to ban all theater in the Pennsylvania colony.

1774

As a wartime measure, the First Continental Congress bans all theatrical performances. This ban lasts until 1789.

1793

Englishman John Bill Ricketts gives America its first complete circus performance in his building at 12th and Market Streets in Philadelphia.

1794

Opening of Philadelphia's 1,165-seat Chestnut Street Theater, the largest theater in North America.

1820

Opening of Philadelphia's Walnut Street Theater, today the oldest playhouse in continuous use in the English-speaking world.

1826

Philadelphia actor Edwin Forrest makes an unheard-of $200 a night headlining as Othello in New York's Bowery Theater. For the next forty years Forrest would reign unchallenged as the America's greatest actor.

1838

Philadelphia trumpeter and composer Frank Johnson leads his African-American band on a tour of Europe, and gives a command performance for England's Queen Victoria.

1848

Stephen Foster's "Ethiopian" song "Oh Susanna" sweeps across the nation and cements his reputation as the nation's hottest songwriter.

1849

The competition between Philadelphian Edwin Forrest and British actor William Charles Macready over who is the greatest actor in the English-speaking world explodes into rioting outside New York City's Astor Place Theater. When it is over, at least twenty-two were dead, and as many as 150 wounded.

1853

Circus impresario Dan Rice establishes headquarters in Girard, just east of Erie, Pennsylvania, in easy reach of the railroad lines that carry his one-ring circus across the country. Rice goes on to become one of the most successful entertainers of the 19th century, and serves as the model for Uncle Sam.

1862

Louisa Lane Drew becomes the manager of Philadelphia's Arch Street Theater, the first female theater manager in the nation. In the decades that follow Mrs. Drew is matriarch of the Barrymores, one of the nation's great theatrical families.

1864

Stephen Foster dies penniless in New York at the age of thirty-seven.

1866

Philadelphia character actor Joseph Jefferson introduces the character of Rip Van Winkle to the American stage. Jefferson goes on to become the nation's most popular comic actor of the late nineteenth century.

1879

James Bland publishes "O Dem Golden Slippers," a popular minstrel tune later adopted as the official song of the Philadelphia Mummers Parade. In the following decade Bland would become the world's most famous composer of minstrel songs.

1888 - 1888

German-American inventor Emile Berliner gives the first public demonstration of the gramophone at the Philadelphia's Franklin Institute

1891

Thomas Edison takes out a patent on the nation's first motion picture camera and projector, the Kinetoscope

1896

Thomas Edison patents Vitascope, a method of filming short moving pictures that he could project onto a screen for paying audiences.

1896

John Philip Sousa and his Orchestra play at the opening of the Willow Grove Amusement Park. Sousa will play there each summer until 1928.

1897

The Berliner Gramophone Company opens the nation's first professional recording studio and retail record shop in downtown Philadelphia

1898

Pittsburgh art-song composer Ethelbert Nevin plays "The Rosary" the same day the battleship Maine is sunk in Havana Harbor. "The Rosary" goes on to become one of the best-selling songs of the early 1900s.

1899

Philadelphia optician turned filmmaker Siegmund Lubin opens his first movie theater in Philadelphia. Based first in Philadelphia and then near Valley Forge, Lubin Films will become one of the nation's largest motion picture companies before a fire in 1914 destroys his film vault.

John Harris and Harry Davis partition off part of their Pittsburgh penny arcade to make room for a theater devoted exclusively to motion pictures and charge a nickel for entrance. Such establishments will come to be known as "nickelodeons."

1905

Victor Talking Machine Company opens its first recording studio at Tenth and Lombard Streets in Philadelphia.

1906

The Warner Brothers - Harry, Sam, and Albert - open their first movie house in the Cascade Theater in New Castle, Pennsylvania. The next year the brothers started the Duquesne Amusement and Supply Company in Pittsburgh, then moved to Hollywood where they built one of the nation's largest and most successful motion picture studios.

1906

The Mishler Theater, built by businessman John D. Mishler, opens in Altoona. Constructed along the main line of the Pennsylvania Railroad, this theater - the crown jewel in a circuit of theaters owned by Mishler that stretches from Lancaster to Allentown - attracts the biggest touring acts in the nation.

1908

Samuel "Roxy" Rothapfel opens a nickelodeon in the back room of a saloon in Forest City, PA. By 1930, Rothapfel owns a chain of lavish motion picture palaces. In 1932 he will become the first manager of New York's Radio City Music Hall, the nation's largest theater.

1910

Movie mogul Siegmund Lubin opens Lubinville, a motion picture studio in North Philadelphia that boasts the world's most powerful lighting system and a stage large enough for five crews to shoot simultaneously. Two years later, Lubin converts the 500-acre Betzwood Estate in Valley Forge into an even larger movie studio with room to shoot both indoor and outdoor film scenes.

1911

Pennsylvania becomes the first state to pass a film censorship law. In the coming decades the Pennsylvania Board of Motion Picture Censors rejects hundreds of films, and requires the editing and removal of hundreds of scenes.

1914

African American entrepreneur John T. Gibson buys the Standard Theater in Philadelphia. An important stop of the black vaudeville circuit, the Standard helps launch the careers of Philadelphia natives Ethel Waters and the Nicholas Brothers.

1915

Philadelphia comic juggler William Claude Dukenfield, a.k.a. "W.C. Fields," gets his big break in show business when he signs a contract to star in the Ziegfeld Follies and also makes his first silent film.

1917

Tom Mix, of Mix Run PA, signs a contract with Fox Studios. Mix will make more than 350 films and become one of the great cowboy stars of the silent film era.

1919

Westinghouse Electric engineer Frank Conrad pulls his microphone close to a phonograph and begins to "broadcast" records from the radio station in his Pittsburgh garage. Within a decade, an emerging commercial radio industry will be revolutionizing the business of American popular music.

1921

Philadelphia's African American-owned Dunbar Theater hosts the all-black musical Shuffle Along, written by Eubie Blake, with lyrics by Noble Sissle. Later that year it becomes the first African American musical to appear on Broadway.

1922

John Barrymore's 101 consecutive performances of Hamlet on Broadway breaks the record set by Edwin Forrest almost a century earlier.

Opening of the Mastbaum Theater in Philadelphia Mastbaum Theater at 20th and Market Street. Seating 5,000 it is the largest motion picture in Pennsylvania and third-largest in the nation.

1932

Olympic gold medallist Johnny Weissmuller, who was born in Windber, PA., stars in MGM Studios" Tarzan the Apeman.

1938

Director Frank Capra casts James Stewart of Indiana, PA, in You Can't Take It With You. In 1940 Stewart wins his first Oscar for The Philadelphia Story.

1940

Oscar Hammerstein II purchases Highland Farm, a 40-acre estate in Bucks County. In 1943 the opening of Oklahoma!, becomes the first of a series of Broadway musicals that makes Rodgers and Hammerstein the biggest names on Broadway.

1952

Pittsburgh song and dance man Gene Kelly stars in Singin" in the Rain, one of the most beloved Hollywood musicals of all time.

1955

Philadelphia's Grace Kelly wins an Academy Award, then leaves Hollywood at the height of her career to marry Prince Rainier III of Monaco.

1956

Dick Clark becomes host of Philadelphia's Bandstand television program. In 1957 the show goes national and brings the music and dances of Philadelphia teenagers into homes across the country.

1958

The low budget science fiction cult classic film, The Blob is produced in Chester Springs PA.

1958

Founded in 1921 as a Jewish summer camp, the Tamiment Theater, known as "Broadway in the Poconos," has a banner year, with production of "The Princess and the Pea"- soon to go to Broadway - and comedy sketches by Woody Allen.

1959

After a short period of spectacular success and increasingly self-destructive behavior, Philadelphia singer Mario Lanza dies in Italy at the age of thirty-eight.

1968

Release of George Romero's Night of the Living Dead in Pittsburgh.

1968

The African American Freedom Theater, on Broad Street in Philadelphia, opens in the house built by famed Philadelphia actor Edwin Forrest in 1853.

1976

Paul Robeson dies in Philadelphia, where he spent the last years of his life.

1984

Playwright August Wilson's play Ma Rainey's Black Bottom debuts on Broadway. Over the next two decades Wilson would pen nine more plays chronicling black life in twentieth-century America, nine of them set in his hometown of Pittsburgh, and win a record seven New York Drama Circle awards.